| Totonacan | |
| Also Known As: | Totonac–Tepehua |
| Region: | Mexico |
| Familycolor: | American |
| Fam1: | Totozoquean ? |
| Protoname: | Proto-Totonacan |
| Glotto: | toto1251 |
| Glottorefname: | Totonacan |
| Child1: | Tepehua |
| Child2: | Totonac |
The Totonacan languages (also known as Totonac–Tepehua languages) are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 290,000 Totonac (approx. 280,000) and Tepehua (approx. 10,000) people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. At the time of the Spanish conquest Totonacan languages were spoken all along the gulf coast of Mexico.During the colonial period, Totonacan languages were occasionally written and at least one grammar was produced. In the 20th century the number of speakers of most varieties have dwindled as indigenous identity increasingly became stigmatized encouraging speakers to adopt Spanish as their main language.
The Totonacan languages have only recently been compared to other families on the basis of historical-comparative linguistics, though they share numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl. Recent work suggests a possible genetic link to the Mixe–Zoque language family, although this has yet to be firmly established.
The family is divided into two branches, Totonac and Tepehua. Of the two, Tepehua is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. MacKay (1999) divides Totonac into four divisions, based on García Rojas (1978):
, Ethnologue recognizes 12 languages in the Totonacan family, three Tepehua languages and nine Totonac. This classification is the basis of the latest version of the ISO language codes for Totonacan, although some of these classifications are disputed.
| Language | ISO code | Locations | Number of speakers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Huehuetla Tepehua | Huehuetla, northeast Hidalgo; Mecapalapa, Puebla | 3,000 (1982 SIL) | ||
| Pisaflores Tepehua | Pisaflores, Hidalgo; Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz | 4,000 (1990 census) | ||
| Tlachichilco Tepehua | Tlachichilco, Veracruz | 3,000 (1990 SIL) | ||
| Papantla Totonac | Around Papantla, central lowland Veracruz | 80,000 (1982 SIL) | ||
| Coyutla Totonac | Coyutla, Veracruz | 48,000 (2000 WCD) | ||
| Highland Totonac | Around Zacatlán, Puebla, and Veracruz | 120,000 (1982 SIL) | ||
| Filomeno Mata Totonac | The town of Filomeno Mata, highland Veracruz, adjacent to Highland Totonac | 15,000 (2000 WCD) | ||
| Xicotepec Totonac | In 30 villages around Xicotepec de Juárez in the Sierra Norte de Puebla and Veracruz | 3,000 (2000 SIL) | ||
| Ozumatlán Totonac | Ozumatlán, Tepetzintla, Tlapehuala and San Agustín in northern Puebla | 1,800 (1990 census) | ||
| Misantla Totonac | Yecuatla and Misantla in southern Veracruz | 500 (1994 SIL) | ||
| Upper Necaxa Totonac | Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán and San Pedro Tlaloantongo in northeastern Puebla | 3,400 (2000 INEGI) | ||
| Tecpatlán Totonac | Tecpatlán, northeastern Puebla | 540 (2000 INEGI) |
The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI) recognizes 10 distinct languages or "linguistic variants" in the family, 3 Tepehua and 7 Totonac [1]
| Language | population (2005 census) | |
|---|---|---|
| Western Tepehua (also known as Tlachichiloco) | 9,200 | |
| Northern Tepehua (also known as Pisaflores) | 2,800 | |
| Southern Tepehua (also known as Huehuetla) | 1,800 | |
| Southeastern Totonac (also known as Misantla) | 490 | |
| Coastal (also known as Papantla) | 58,200 | |
| North Central (also known as Xicotepec) | 15,100 | |
| South Central (also known as Highland) | 114,900 | |
| High Central (also known as Filomeno Mata) | 8,700 | |
| Cerro del Xinolatépetl (also known as Ozumatlán) | 1,000 | |
| Upper Necaxa | 3,300 |
Coyutla Totonac is grouped with South Central Totonac by INALI while Tecpatlán Totonac is included in the North Central Totonac group. Other recent attempts at classification have suggested that some of these divisions, particularly North Central, Costal, and South Central, and are far too broad and include varieties that might also be classified as separate languages.
A further drawback of the Ethnologue and INALI classifications is the lack of lower-level subgroups beyond the two-way division into Totonac and Tepehua. In the Totonac branch of the family, Misantla is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group. Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as "Central Totonac," are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is at least a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland/Coastal varieties. Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern, although this is still uncertain, pending more exhaustive investigation. The most recent proposal for the family is as follows:
Lexical comparison also suggests that, for Tepehua, Pisaflores and Huehuetla may be more closely related to each other than either is to Tlalchichilco.
MacKay and Trechsel (2018) provide the following internal classification:
There is some variation in the sound systems of the different varieties of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phoneme inventory can be considered a typical Totonacan inventory.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | lateral | |||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Plosive | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | (pronounced as /link/) | |||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
Most Totonacan languages have a three-vowel system with each quality making distinctions of length and laryngealization. The following is the "typical" Totonacan vocalic inventory.
| Central | Back | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| creaky | plain | creaky | plain | creaky | plain | ||
| Close | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Open | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | |||||
Tepehua has lost the phonemic laryngealization of vowels and has ejective stops where Totonac has creaky vowels preceded by stops. Some Totonac languages have five-vowel systems, having developed pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //o// phonemes, whereas in others pronounced as /[e]/ and pronounced as /[o]/ are clearly allomorphs of pronounced as //i// and pronounced as //u//, respectively, conditioned by proximity to uvular stops or fricatives.
From a typological perspective, the Totonac–Tepehua family presents a fairly consistent profile, and exhibits many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking, and extensive use of body part morphemes in metaphorical and locative constructions. The Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic with nominative/accusative alignment and a flexible constituent order governed by information structure. Syntactic relations between the verb and its arguments are marked by agreement with the subject and one or sometimes two objects. There is no morphological case on nouns and many languages in the family lack prepositions, making use instead of a rich system of causatives, applicatives, and prefixes for body parts and parts of objects. Possession is marked on the possessed noun, the head of the NP. Otherwise, nouns are uninflected, number being an optional category and grammatical gender being absent from the languages. Numerals quantifying nouns bear classificatory prefixes, something that is unusual cross-linguistically as affixal classifiers tend heavily to be suffixes. Totonacan languages are also known for their use of sound symbolism.
Totonacan languages have a wide assortment of morphemes for increasing the valency of a verb.
All Totonacan languages have at least one causative morpheme, a prefix ma:-:
In many of the languages, the causative prefix is regularly or obligatorily associated with a suffix:
In some languages like Upper Necaxa, the suffix is analyzed as part of the causative morpheme, but in others it is treated as a separate transitivizer.
One of the most frequently used valency-increasing affixes in the Totonacan languages is the dative or benefactive suffix:
All the languages of the family have a comitative construction in which both an actor and a co-actor of a verb are specified. For instance, in Huehuetla Tepehua a verb such as tamakahuːn 'stay, be in a place' is intransitive but can take a comitative prefix to form a verb ta̰ːtamakahuːn meaning 'stay with someone', someone being the co-actor:
Similarly, the Papantla Totonac verb muxuː ‘bury something’ is transitive but becomes ditransitive when it takes the comitative prefix:
The third applicative prefix that is shared across the family is analyzed in most of the languages as an instrumental applicative and is used to add an object used as an instrument or a means to a clause:
Olintla Totonac
In some of the languages, the instrumental can also be used for the expression of motives:
As seen in the last example, this prefix is ɬi- in Tepehua languages rather than liː- as it is in Totonac, and in Tlachichilco and Huehuetla it is analyzed as a directional ("DIR") rather than an instrumental. The prefix seems to be less frequent in Tepehua than in Totonac.
The Totonacan languages exhibit a phenomenon similar to noun incorporation whereby special prefixing combining forms of body-parts may be added to verbs. When these prefixes are added, they generally serve to delimit the verb's locus of affect; that is, they indicate which part of the subject or object is affected by the action.
The prefixes can also be used to specify the shape of an affected object:
It is worthwhile to note that the prefixation does not decrease the valency of the verb, differentiating this process from true noun incorporation as the term is usually understood.
Another important role that bodypart prefixes play in Totonacan languages is in the formulation of expressions of the spatial location of objects, which combine a part-prefix with one of four posture verbs (words for ’sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’, and ‘be high’):
These constructions alternate with expressions using the independent (full) form of the part as a preposition-like element:
In the last sentence, the independent form of a̰kpuː- is formed by combining this prefix with a base -n which is sometimes (as here) analyzed as a nominalizing suffix. Because words for body parts are inflected for possession, a̰kpuːn has a third-person singular possessive prefix, linking it to Spanish; Castilian: mesa, the object on whose crown the book is located (see the section below on Possessive constructions).
Possessive constructions in Totonacan languages are marked on the possessed noun rather than on the possessor noun:
The person of the possessor is indicated by a prefix and the number of the possessor by a suffix, as shown by the follow paradigm from Upper Necaxa:
| plural | ||
| kin–kṵ́šḭ | kin–kṵ́šḭ–ka̰n | |
| min–kṵ́šḭ | min–kṵ́šḭ–ka̰n | |
| ḭš–kṵ́šḭ | ḭš–kṵ́šḭ–ka̰n |
Numerals in Totonacan languages are bound roots that require a classificatory prefix which changes based on the type, shape or measure of object being counted. This is illustrated for one of the languages Upper Necaxa Totonac in the table below:
| maktin čoʍ ‘one tortilla’ | pḛʔtin pa̰ʔɬma̰ ‘one leaf’ | ʔentin kḭwḭ ‘one stick’ | paːtin ɬa̰mam ‘one pot’ | puːlaktin sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘one banana tree’ | mustin sḛ́ːʔna' ‘one full bunch of bananas’ | kilhmaktin sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘one small bunch of bananas’ | heːtin sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘one banana’ | ||||||||
| maktṵ́ čoʍ ‘two tortillas’ | pḛʔtṵ pa̰ʔɬma̰ ‘two leaves’ | ʔentṵ kḭwḭ ‘two sticks’ | paːtṵ ɬa̰mam ‘two pots’ | puːlaktuː sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘two banana trees’ | mustṵ sḛ́ːʔna' ‘two full bunches of bananas’ | kilhmaktṵ sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘two small bunches of bananas’ | heːtṵ sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘two bananas’ | ||||||||
| maktṵtun čoʍ ‘three tortillas’ | pḛʔtṵtun pa̰ʔɬma̰ ‘three leaves’ | ʔentṵtun kḭwḭ ‘three sticks’ | paːtṵtun ɬa̰mam ‘three pots’ | puːlaktṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘three banana trees’ | mustṵtun sḛ́ːʔna' ‘three full bunches of bananas’ | kilhmaktṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘three small bunches of bananas’ | heːtṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘four bananas’ | ||||||||
| makta̰ːtḭ čoʍ ‘four tortillas’ | pḛʔta̰ːtḭ pa̰ʔɬma̰ ‘four leaves’ | ʔenta̰ːtḭ kḭwḭ ‘four sticks’ | paːta̰ːtḭ ɬa̰mam ‘four pots’ | puːtṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘four banana trees’ | mustṵtun sḛ́ːʔna' ‘four full bunches of bananas’ | kilhmaktṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘four small bunches of bananas’ | heːtṵtun sḛ́ːʔna̰ ‘four bananas’ |
In total, Upper Necaxa has around 30 classificatory prefixes.
The following table compares the numeral bases of six Totonacan languages.
| Tepehua | Totonac | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Huehuetla | Pisaflores | Tlachichilco | Upper Necaxa | Papantla | Misantla | |
| 1 | -tam | -tam | -tawm | -tin | -tum | -tun |
| 2 | -t’ui | -t’ui | -t’ui | -tṵ | -tṵy | -tṵʔ |
| 3 | -t’utu | -t’utu | -t’útu | -tṵtún | -tṵ́:tu | -atún |
| 4 | -t’at’ɪ | -t’aːt’i | -t’áːt’i | -táːtḭ | -táːtḭ | -ta̰ːt |
| 5 | -kis | -kiːs | -kiːs | -kitsís | -kitsís | -kítsis |
| 6 | -čašan | -čášan | -čášan | -čašán | -čašán | -čaːšán |
| 7 | -tuhun | -tuhún | -tuhún | -toxón | -tuxún | -tuhún |
| 8 | -ts’ahin | -tsahín | -tsahín | -tsayán | -tsayán | -tsiyán |
| 9 | -nahats | -naháːtsi | -naháːtsi | -naxáːtsa | -naxáːtsa | -naháːtsa |
| 10 | -kau | -kaw | -kaw | -kaux | -kaw | -kaːwi |
A prominent feature of Totonacan languages is the presence of sound symbolism.[2] The most common (but by no means only) sound-symbolic pattern in Totonacan involves fricative alterations, typically /s/ ~ /š/ ~ /ɬ/ and occasionally /ts/ ~ /č/ ~ /š/ correlated either with increasingly more energetic or forceful action or with the size of an event participant, as in the following examples from Upper Necaxa Totonac:
| laŋs ‘hand striking hard’ laŋš ‘blow striking with force’ laŋɬ ‘blow striking with great force’ | spipispipi ‘small person or animal trembling’ špipišpipi ‘person or animal shivering or shaking slightly’ ɬpipiɬpipi ‘person or animal shaking or having convulsions’ |
The following selection of Proto-Totonacan reconstructions and descendants is taken from MacKay and Trechsel (2018),[4] using data from several other studies. The reconstructions and descendants are written in Americanist notation.
| Totonac | Tepehua | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proto-Totonacan | |||||||||||||
| 'ash(es)' | ɬká̰k | ɬka̰ka̰n | ɬka̰kán | ɬká̰ka̰ | ɬka̰ka̰ | ɬkakáʔ | ɬká̰ka̰ | ɬká̰ka̰ | ɬk’ák’a | ɬk’ak’a | ɬk’ák’a | |
| 'wins; earns' | ɬáahá | ƛahá | ɬaxá | ƛahá | ƛahay | ƛaha- | ƛaháy | ƛahá | ɬaháay | ɬaháy | ɬaháay | |
| 'gourd' | qá̰a̰š | qa̰a̰š | ʔa̰a̰š | qá̰a̰ši | qa̰a̰šḭ | qa:šíʔ | qá̰a̰šḭ | qá̰a̰šḭ | ʔá̰a̰ši | ʔaaš | ʔaš | |
| 'writes' | ¢ɔ̰́χ | ¢o̰qa | ¢ó̰ʔa | ¢ɔ́qḁ | ¢o̰qa | ¢uqa | ¢ɔ̰qnán | ¢ó̰qa | ¢’ɔ́ʔa | ¢’oqa | ¢’oʔa | |
| 'pig' | pá̰šnḭ | pa̰šnḭ | pá̰šnḭ | pá̰šn̥i̥ | pa̰šnḭ | pašniʔ | pá̰šnḭ | pa̰šni | ɓá̰šn̥i̥ | p’aš | p’ašni | |
| 'mouth' | kíɬnḭ | kiɬnḭ | kíɬnḭ | kíɬni̥̰ | kiɬnḭ | kiɬniʔ | kíɬnḭ | kiɬni | kíɬn̥i̥ | kiɬ | kiɬna | |
| 'stone' | čɪ́wɪš | čiwiš | čiwíš | číwiš | číwiš | čɪ́wiš | číwiš | číwiš | číʔṵši̥ | čiiuš | číyuš | |
| 'is lying down' | má̰a̰ɬ | ma̰a̰ | maaɬ | máa̰h | ma̰h | má | máh | má | máaɬ | maaɬ | maa | |
Totonacan-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XECTZ-AM, broadcasting from Cuetzalan, Puebla.